URLs du Jour

A much younger version of your blogger once stood in line behind George
F. Will at a Shakey's Pizza Parlor in Bethesda, Maryland. And
he will never forget Mr. Will's words to his wife that day:

Honey, do you want beer, or root beer, or what?

That story has nothing to do with anything, but your blogger nevertheless
likes to tell it. According to their website,
the Shakey's nearest to Pun Salad World Headquaters is 1009 miles
away, in Warner Robins, Georgia. And, what do you know, there
it is.

Today at Newsweek, Mr. Will notes that not only
are an increasing number of Americans disbelieving President Obama, they
"do not believe that he believes what he says." Arguably worse! Among
the contributing factors is the one we ranted on a couple
days ago:

He says America's health-care system is going to wrack and ruin and
requires root-and-branch reform--but that if you like your health care
(as a large majority of Americans do), nothing will change for you. His
slippery new formulation is that nothing in his plan will "require"
anyone to change coverage. He used to say, "If you like your health-care
plan, you'll be able to keep your health-care plan, period." He had to
stop saying that because various disinterested analysts agree that his
plan will give many employers incentives to stop providing coverage for
employees.

At the American Spectator, Peter Ferrara similarly
hooks the president's speech up to a lie detector, and notes
the needles twitching wildly, lights flashing, and smoke
coming out of various orifices:

If you are one of the almost 12 million
Americans with low cost
Health Savings Account insurance plans or similar high
deductible plans, and you like it, too bad, because Obama's
promise of allowing you to keep your plan does not apply to you,
just as it does not apply to the 10 million seniors with
Medicare
Advantage, or the 88 million estimated to be dumped into the
Obama/Democrat "public option." Obama offered the nation
another
calculated deception last Wednesday when he proclaimed
"nothing
in this plan will require you or your
employer to change
the coverage or the doctor you have." No, nothing
will require
it, it will just have that effect, as Obama knows,
which is why
he so carefully and misleadingly phrased it this
way.

But if you'd like to get away from Obamacare for awhile, you can read
the sad story of yet another effort to run a public institution
of higher education (specifically, East Georgia College) via arbitrary whim:

Professor Thomas Thibeault made the mistake of pointing out--at a sexual
harassment training seminar--that the school's sexual harassment policy
contained no protection for the falsely accused. Two days later, in a
Kafkaesque irony, Thibeault was fired by the college president for
sexual harassment. More than a month later, despite multiple requests
for information, Thibeault has never received a statement of the charges
against him, nor any evidence, nor any idea of whether there is actually
an accuser, nor any hearing.

If Kafka had never written, I wonder what we'd call these kinds of
proceedings?

I suspect that given
the chance to do so, about 5-10% of the respondents
in a random polling sample will
falsely claim to hold bizarre and extreme views. Just to mess with the
pollster's mind, man.

P Is For Peril

Another outing for the intrepid private eye
Kinsey Millhone, this one being number …
um…

% perl -e 'print ord('P') - ord('A') + 1, "\n";'
16

… number 16 in Sue Grafton's conveniently-titled series. Ms.
Grafton's
U book is coming out in December, which puts
me five behind. (I did that calculation on my fingers.)

In this one, Kinsey is hired to find a missing doctor, by the missing
doctor's ex-wife. In a subplot,
Kinsey also needs to find some new, affordable office
space, as her current arrangement is becoming increasingly untenable.
Both efforts immediately get complicated, as (a) Kinsey gets involved
in the innermost workings of the
family and work associates of the missing doc; (b) she
finds an ideal office, but her prospective landlords are a pair of
brothers with a shady past, and (worse) one develops kind of a romantic
obsession with Kinsey. Nevertheless, she does some real detecting here;
and, yes, at one point she's in actual peril.

I found this installment in the series to be a significant improvement
over the ones immediately preceding. As always, Kinsey is a sharp-eyed
observer of her environment and others, and she's not so hot at
self-reflection. (Although the books are written with Kinsey
first-person narrating, Ms. Grafton somehow wangles to reveal more
about Kinsey than Kinsey knows herself. Good trick.)

As an extra current-events bonus, Medicare fraud is involved.

I should also note that Ms. Grafton seems to cut back here on the
semi-annoying habit of including piles of irrelevant details, for
which I previously awarded her the title "The Queen of Pointless Description".

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